Information technology (IT) infrastructure refers to the set of hardware, software, network resources and services required for the existence, operation and management of an organization's IT environment. The IT infrastructure allows the organization to deliver IT solutions and services (e.g., applications) to its employees, partners and/or customers and is usually internal to an organization and deployed within owned facilities.
The IT infrastructure may be maintained, for example, by administrators, so that the IT solutions and services are properly delivered to users without interruptions or down time. An aspect of this maintenance requires that operations of diverse components of the IT infrastructure are continuously monitored so that problems can be addressed in good time. In example implementations, the diverse components of the IT infrastructure (including applications running on the IT infrastructure) may report machine-generated messages (e.g., performance data, event data, log or message data, error data, etc.) in real time or near real time. In principle, the IT administrators may use the machine-generated messages to assess the health of the IT infrastructure to identify specific problems with the components of the IT infrastructure that need to be addressed. In practice, with typical size IT infrastructure, the volume of machine-generated messages (most of which can be routine or non-problematic log and event reporting data) can be massive. Administrators are likely to be overwhelmed by the massive amount of machine-generated messages and unable to peruse the messages meaningfully to quickly identify any IT infrastructure anomalies or problems that should be addressed. Going through the large volume of messages, and making decisions, or taking actions to address anomalies or problems based on the messages, can be very difficult if not an impossible task for the administrators of the IT infrastructure.
Consideration is now being given to systems and methods for utilizing the machine-generated messages generated by an IT infrastructure to quickly identify or recognize specific potential problems with the IT infrastructure.